Contact Lullaby

With growing knowledge and curiosity on the world of the microbiome, our understanding of self and identity are beginning to shift. Contact Lullaby is a speculative provocation on new tools and rituals for changing families as we grow to understand our relationship to the invisible colonies within us.

While diving into the world of the invisible microbiome, we were fascinated by new discoveries of their effect on our behavior and identity. Through research of new scientific breakthroughs and critically thinking about its social implications, we began to extrapolate possible scenarios for the future. As a group, we gravitated towards family structure and the idea of biological bonding. As our social boundaries of coupling and families continue to change, we saw an opportunity to use the microbiome as new ways for families to bond outside of biological birth. What if we began to see bacteria as valuable rather than something to be cleaned? For this speculative film, we designed a set of rituals and tools that promote the exchange of bacteria rich "hot spots" that would enable non-biological families to foster social-emotional connections.